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Tip Tuesday — Not Meant to Be

Tips are now back on Tuesdays because, hey, I’m the boss of this blog.

My sister-in-law and her roommates used to always ask me for romance advice because I’m totally married so I know pretty much all there is to know about dating and romance.Â The advice was so good that a couple of months ago she set off on an 18 month adventure as the Mormon equivalent of a nun.

Good times.

Today please give me signs that a relationship is just not meant to be.Â Here are mine.

It’s just not meant to be if:

-You excitedly take the big step of going home with your true love to meet the fam, only to have him introduce you by saying, “This is Kathryn.Â She lives in my apartment complex and she didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving.”

You spend more time apologizing for imagined slights then just having a conversation. You’ve gone through 3 boxes of Kleenex this week and you haven’t had a cold. He says you’d be perfect if you’d just lose x pounds and change your taste in music and go by a different nickname and…

He wakes you up at 2 o’clock in the morning to accuse you of trying to sneak out to cheat on him. Repeatedly.
He hocks ALL of your jewelry.
You find out he only asked you out because his girlfriend is pregnant and won’t have sex with him.
Yes, all this has happened to me. Thank goodness I found a good one before giving up completely!

He insults your watch, makes fun of you for struggling in American Heritage (that you were taking for the second time) and proceeds to tell you how he thinks your roommate has such pretty, long hair (only mentioning that yours is short, which evidently doesn’t equal pretty)

GUY I DIDN’T MARRY: He dumps you again and again because his mother doesn’t like you and complains that you’re not the kind of girl who will bring him his newspaper and slippers when he comes home from work so he can relax while you chase around the TEN children! Yeah, dude, you and your mother are right — I’m not doing ANY of that.

GUY I DID MARRY: You invite him to go to Sea World with you and some friends and he says “Sea World is dumb”, then calls you the morning of the Sea World adventure to say he still doesn’t want to go to Sea World because Sea World is still dumb, but he does want to go visit his parents, so could he bum a ride to San Diego…

Picks you up at work at 6:30pm for your first date to a “festival” (doesn’t festival sound like there is food involved?). Upon arriving at the festival, he says, “Oh, did you already eat dinner because there’s no food at this festival.” Uh, where would I have eaten dinner between leaving the front door of my work and walking across the sidewalk to get into your car? When I said no, I hadn’t eaten, he reaches into the backseat of his car and pulls out a bag of fruit that had been sitting in his HOT car for many, many hours and offers me a HOT orange…

He’s actually one of the kindest, most considerate people I know, but the first few encounters…not so much.

….he takes you out to eat at McDonald’s on your first date. Realizing it is very busy in the drive-thru, he asks if it is “ok if we go inside, just this once?” Then tells you how he wants to drive you around to show you ‘stuff’. He takes you on a tour of the countryside, past his uncle’s feed store, and says “next time, I’ll take you to meet my Uncle Junior.” Perturbed at how you seem to be sitting as far away from him in the monster truck cab seat as you possibly can, he says you are “being a DDP – d*** door pusher (insert expletive beginning with ‘d’) and you should scoot closer.”
This is your cue to jump out of the moving vehicle, with no concern that you are out in the middle of the sticks, with no street lights, and plenty of trees to smack into when you jump. But go ahead, jump. It will be worth it, believe me.
(and yes, this did happen to me.) Except for the jumping out. But I did refuse to get back into the car once I got out. One phone call to Dad took care of it all! Oh, and this was a blind date set up by my cousin’s boyfriend. 🙂
I love your blog!!!

On your first date with him he points out that your shoes and your handbag don’t match (happened to my sister)

Big red flag: when you notice that you are constantly having to apoligize for, explain, or defend him and his actions to your friends and family. That is a pretty clear-cut sign that he is a loser and you need to kick him to the curb. Or in my case, stupidly continue to like him until he dumps you, twice. Hindsight is always so much clearer.

While he’s telling you about his medication for Bipolar disorder, he also tells you that you make him “amorous.” He later tells you in a letter, while you are the Mormon equivalent of a nun, that he’s been praying to find out if you are “THE ONE.” Without asking you how you feel about this decision. And then he writes you about how angry it made him when you asked him to stop writing to you.

Or how about this one: after not having heard from him in 3 months, you get an invitation to his wedding.

He tells you that you’re wasting your time in graduate school, because “You don’t need a master’s degree to stay home with kids.” When you remind him that you’re getting a PhD, he says, “No wife of mine needs a PhD.”

He calls you up before your date and tells you to go ahead and go to the movie by yourself–he needs to keep studying. But he’ll meet you for ice cream afterwards.

Better yet: a week after you make a joke about an invitation of his to walk around because it’s such a nice day sounding like a marriage proposal in disguise, he responds with, “Don’t flatter yourself.” Then he immediately asks you out again. Two days later, he comes up to you and a male friend and asks if you’re dating this other guy. Upon hearing a response in the negative, he replies, “Oh, ’cause I wanted to ask someone else out for Friday night instead.”

Wow! I didn’t realize there were so many screwed up boys out there. This is frightening.

Can I just add that if he tells you when he’s coming to take you out, without asking you out to begin with, shows up at 11:00 in the morning on a Saturday (after calling at 10 and saying he was on his way), spends 2 and a half hours arguing religion and music with your mother, takes you to McDonalds, makes fun of your hometown (as though you personally at 17 are responsible for it’s short comings), takes you to Big Lots and knocks things off the shelves as he walks down the asiles until he finds a bottle of black glue and then chases you around the store trying to squirt it on you, takes you to a Paulie Shore movie and discusses your mutual best friends’ sex life loudly in the theater repeatedly using the phrase “Why can’t they just masterbate?,” and finally drops you off at home at 7:30…LOCK THE DOOR!!!!

Then there’s my story where my nearly-fiance opted not to take me home for the holidays to meet his family because he got a better offer to go and play football in the mud with his buddies. True love I tell you. And I still married him.

When he tells you that it shouldn’t matter if one of your closest friends (who dated him at one time) is upset about your relationship because your relationship with him can be eternal, whereas your friendship can’t possibly last.
Or whose roundabout way of proposing was to ask how you would feel if he asked you to marry him (so he could pretend that he wasn’t really asking when you said no.)
Who comes to the jewelry store where you work and buys 3 pieces of jewelry for valentines day, one for his ex (the aforementioned friend), one for you, and one for his current girlfriend.
Or…a few years later after you are engaged to someone else, he comes to your work (a week before you are getting married) and asks you to wait to get married until he can get pitch his wife and kids and he wants you to give him another chance.
And yes, this was all the SAME guy!

Dude. No stories to share, just thought I’d say that I personally could never date a guy whose manicure was better than mine, because really, who wants a lifetime of that kind of competetion?

Oh, and to fess up that I’m the dork that called today and tried to leave a message with that nice person who answered your phone but I kept going “Huh? You still there?” because the cell phone reception was breaking up. Just in case you were wondering.

If after you converse with God in prayer telling him you’ve decided to call off the long-distance engagement with your fiance, and the fiance calls within seconds of that prayer, you can take that as a sign that you need to break it off NOW!

1) He gets drunk at a party and throws his arms around you and says “I love you so much, [insert name of your best friend here].”

2) You break up with him because you discover he’s addicted to porn, and then he shows up on your doorstep with an engagement ring in one hand and his torn-up naughty-movie-store membership card in the other. How touching.

3) He spends 80% of the relationship talking about how much he hates it that everyone assumes he’s gay. And he likes to get manicures. And has a wider assortment of beauty products than you do.

4) On the third date he gets a phone call from a woman and while trying to hit “ignore” on his phone accidentally picks up, and her panicked voice is heard on the other end, asking where he is. His subsequent explanation of who she is paints her as a jilted girlfriend halfway across the country. Every textbook clue to dishonesty is in full force, but at least he gets really angry and stalks you when you tell him you don’t want to see him anymore.

He misses your sister’s wedding because he can’t miss going to the gym on Saturday!

He sets you up on a “date” with his best friend because he’s scoping out another girl, but wants to keep you on the line, just in case. Sorry about his luck when it didn’t work out with the other girl, and his girlfriend dumped him for his best friend!

He takes you on your first date to go watch him go “paintballing” with his friends. HE picks you up in a beat up pickup in 90 degree weather with no a/c, for an hour drive! You sit in a deserted warehouse and watch them run by every once in awhile and shoot at each other. The date wraps up by him driving you around the country to the land where he will one day build a house. No. thanks.

This one was ALL my fault but still a pretty good indicator: When you dated a guy three months, broke up with him, you’re with someone else, you and the new guy see the break-up guy somewhere, you and the break-up guy look each other in the eye, you realize you’ve made a big mistake in breaking up, and you spend the rest of the evening with the new guy, SOBBING… that’s a good sign it’s not going to work out.

My clue should have been when he tells you that he finally got the nerve up to talk to the teller at his bank that you know he thinks is cute. You know what he really means is that he asked her out, and when you ask what he thought of to say to her he admits it. How do you feel? Proud that of him. (Really.) That was a weird moment and should have been a clue about my feelings for him, but no. Sigh. So glad I’m no longer 19.

Or how about he tells you over and over that you don’t know how romantic he is and that you are going to be surprised when he does propose… but he never does. I had no clue at 23 either.

Really the only thing these guys had in common was that they were older than me. I waited almost 10 years to marry my husband (not counting the 5 year dry spell between Mr. Romantic and meeting future hubby). He’s 8 years younger than me. I don’t know if that means that I was confused about the age of a guy I should be with or just needed to be patient, but either way it worked!

He tells you that his life before his 2 year version of being a priest (? )(obviously not male nun but what is it exactly called?) is no longer a part of his life. It didn’t happen. The past is the past.

I swear it really happened. At the time, I asked my sister if she noticed anything weird, and the two of us watched the situation furtively from the stairs. At one point, my boyfriend actually GIGGLED at my male cousin, and my sis said, “Oh, yep, there. He just flamed out.”

Nicest guy in the world, though. And my cousin is a good looking guy, I guess. At least my boyfriend had good taste.

Delurking to say WOW! I can’t believe so many men were hit with the dumb stick.

Should have known when he said: “you and I have something better than what 95% of all married people have, but I’m the type who is always going to be looking for that extra 5%”. Why oh why I stayed 7 years after that is a mystery.

guy i was engaged to (and didn’t marry) once waxed poetic about my brown eyes. which are blue. so blue that everyone comments on them.

first date: “so, how many kids do you want? how do you feel about the name emmanuel for a son?”

first time TALKING to the guy: “so, what would you do if you met a guy who you wanted to marry who lived, say, in new orleans and was in the army?” he was in the air force out of georgia. he went home and told his family he’d met the woman he was going to marry and they bought me “achieving a celestial marriage” and some other temple marriage book. he married someone else two months later. imagine my surprise when, six or seven years later, we ended up in the same ward 3000 miles away from where we met. sigh. THAT was fun. even more fun when his wife ran around telling everyone that i dated her husband and almost married him. he’s not the type of guy you’d brag about, even if any of that had been true.

“your middle name is elizabeth?! that’s perfect! when elizabeth and i got engaged, i had her name engraved inside the ring, so it’ll still work!”

you realise that you’re screwed up but your issues pale by comparison next to his. you communicate online and happen to be the ex gf (whom he knew nothing off) of a good friend of his. Its not meant to be when he asks you if ‘we’ (which never existed) were ‘fated’ just because YOU said hello…and told him he was hot…oh and the other one was not meant to be either for obvious reasons…men….